Posted
by
timothy
on Saturday November 16, 2013 @09:27AM
from the that's-just-the-solar-cover-charge dept.

mdsolar writes with this excerpt from Bloomberg News: "Arizona will permit the state's largest utility to charge a monthly fee to customers who install photovoltaic panels on their roofs, in a closely watched hearing that drew about 1,000 protesters and may threaten the surging residential solar market. The Arizona Corporation Commission, which regulates utilities in the state, agreed in a 3-to-2 vote at a meeting [Thursday] in Phoenix that Arizona Public Service Co. may collect about $4.90 a month from customers with solar systems. Arizona Public is required to buy solar power from customers with rooftop panels, and the commission agreed with its argument that the policy unfairly shifts some of the utility's costs to people without panels. Imposing a fee designed to address this issue may prompt power companies in other states to follow suit, and will discourage some people from installing new systems, according to the Sierra Club."

shifts costs to the utility? What costs? A second meter base (which the customer has to pay for anyway) and a second meter? The second meter can't possibly cost $4.90/mo to maintain, over the typical life-time of a system.

Anything that generates electricity that is not a huge power plant is a threat to the electric company. They will do whatever they can to mitigate that threat. They do not want to become an entity in a world where everyone has generating capacity at their own homes, and they simply maintain a network or wires to share surplus amongst them and top them off at peak load times.

The power company openly welcomes almost any generation on the grid. That power becomes a supplier. However the utility's most important goal is reliable power which solar notoriously difficult to provide.

Then there is the cost of supporting the transmission of electricity. Generation companies pay that as a fee, why shouldn't individuals. As a customer, I love the power company paying me for excess generation but as a utility worker, why should the utility pay retail cost for power (when the maintenance cost is high) and they can buy it cheaper elsewhere.

This isn't really an argument for the individual customers but for these groups (like cited in the original article) who provide you with 'low upfront costs' where you get almost little in return. Their solar panels, their federal tax incentives, generating on your rooftop for a small relief in power you buy from them. Funny how they are charging the homeowner a 'maintenance' fee already. They've been gaming the system and simply want to protect their profits.

You have no clue what you are talking about. Arizona utility companies pay a wholesale rate to solar homeowners for the electricity they generate. During on peak hours my utility pays me a few cents per kWh and resells that for, depending on the time of use plan the other customer has chosen, possibly 10 times that amount. They do not pay me retail for my excess generation, and they always zero out the balance in April before the hot months start so that my credited kWh balance doesn't offset my usage in those months that my demand exceeds the capacity of my system.

Some utility companies want to support their customers, others, like the one in the article, would rather support increasing profits.Where I live, there are 3 utility districts right together, but you don't get a choice as to which one you have. The one that likes building massive fancy office buildings for itself charges 30% and 40% more than the other two. They are getting power from the same feeds.

A few years back, a bill was defeated that would have given home owners with solar around a 20% premium abov

Apparently, the Arizona Public Service Company is a subsidiary [wikipedia.org] of Pinnacle West Capital Corporation not the state of Arizona. So your chain of reasoning is incomplete. This incidentally is one reason for disengaging such services from public control. It reduces the incident of conflicts of interest.

Surely conflict of interest is an argument for keeping utilities under public rather than private control, because then the utility's interests are aligned with the public rather than the private ownership.

I live off solar. It's fine. LED lighting is cheap enough and doesn't take a huge power draw. My huge power draw is the heater and the hot water heater. No problem. We have these things called Batteries... So I charge for a few hours to heat water for 15 mins. So what? It works fine. Solar panels are down around $1/watt, even for decent panels made somewhere without slave labor.

I live in Oregon. Clouds and night time aren't that bad. It does help that my home is Tiny though.

And that's the tradeoff. You either need to have an incredibly tiny and power efficient house, or you need to have a backup system. Even the most ardent off the grid supporters accept that [motherearthnews.com].

My huge power draw is the heater and the hot water heater. No problem. We have these things called Batteries...

Huh? From sunlight to electricity to battery storage to hot water sounds like a rather inefficient and expensive roundtrip. Why don't you use a solar water heater and/or store hot water in a well insulated tank?

As for the global warming denying... Assuming that global warming isn't real(it is though), you might get farther with politeness instead of calling us scum.

This is a two way street in which anyone who seems to question the global warming agenda is instantly vilified. Even people who bring up subjects that have later been declared valid and included or attempted to be included into the models remain vilified. I certainly can understand why someone would be quick to go to that edge.

There is a cost of spinning reserve and grid stability maintenance. Why shouldn't those who need it or negatively impact it pay for it? The real cost should probably be even more, depending on the size of the installation. Its only $4.95/mo.

It does depend on the size of the installation. $0.70 per KW capacity. Generally, customers who need more power need more grid service, including the spinning reserve you mention. And, since solar provides power at the highest demand periods, it costs those types of costs rather than increasing them. Though a bit more random, even wind is capping the expense of gas by putting the less efficient peakers off line to the extent that nukes are close because they can't compete. http://will.illinois.edu/nfs/ [illinois.edu]

Nuclear has nothing to do with it. Spinning reserve is managed with fossil, gas, and hydro. The peak smoothing would be a more solid argument if solar produced a steady output during the peak 'work day'. Unfortunately, solar produces heaving only for a few hours of that higher need period. Various sources tend to ignore those impacts.

The solar fans would be much better suited to address the related issues and look for solutions rather than ignore and claim they don't exist.

There is a cost of spinning reserve and grid stability maintenance. Why shouldn't those who need it or negatively impact it pay for it?

The answer has to do with the Prisoner's Dilemma [wikipedia.org]. What is best for the individual may not be the best for society, and what appears to be a sub-optimal choice for the individual often turns out to be better for the individual in the long run if everyone makes the same choice.

For a concrete example, consider the Polio vaccine [wikipedia.org]. There is a small chance of getting polio from the vaccine, so from the individual's point of view it makes no sense to get your kids vaccinated. If everyone else is vaccinated, you can

Just to get the facts straight, the live attenuated polio vaccine is not used any more because the risk/payoff ratio changed so drastically (largely because of its success). We have the inactivated vaccine, which is not as effective, but does not carry a risk of disease. When the pool of the infected is low enough due to suppression by the live vaccine, there is no reason to use the live vaccine anymore.

The grid tie fee would have to be a lot more than $4.90/month to make the batteries look economical. Have you priced an off-the-grid system? Have you tried living on one? It either requires major lifestyle changes, a truly immense investment in panels and batteries (plus ongoing maintenance costs for the batteries) or a generator that will be running more often than you'd like, burning fossil fuels less efficiently than a big plant would. Anybody who buys batteries in response to this policy is cutt

Are you the same nut that attacked me recently? I see you still have no capacity to control your emotions are state any actual useful information.

Maybe you can explain how panels smooth out peaks? They are not inductive. They peak and wane every day and even during the day. I suspect any response from you will not be informative but will rather be an attack, in which case you will get no further discussion from me.

Obviously you have never taken a look at the California ISO website during the summer, which gives real information on demand and production. as opposed to rants of solar fanboys writing for Wikipedia. Peak production from solar occurs at 12 noon, peak demand occurs at 6PM. Solar does help with energy production during the hottest part of the days but is no help when demand is highest and thus does nothing to reduce the need for spinning reserves.

This is all very well and good, but does it scale? Suppose every single house and business the grid served had enough capacity to go net zero. That is, they generate their entire day's budget of power, including nighttime use, using their panels. This means that on sunny days, the power has to get stored, because by definition everybody is generating more than the total they need during daylight hours. Or else it just goes to a resistor bank or something.

And then on cloudy days, and at night, the energy has to come either from grid-tied storage, or from non-solar generators (one would like for that to be wind, but it's not a perfect solution at the moment). And of course there is a very substantial cost to actually maintaining the grid. So in this scenario, the cost of the non-solar generation capacity and the grid has to be paid for by someone; if everybody who is connected to the grid is paying zero, or slightly less, then the money has to come from somewhere, and that's going to be the power company.

Of course, that's one extreme; the other is no site-generated power. You can draw a graph; on the left zero net-zero sites, on the right, 100% net zero sites. For some part of the left-hand side of the chart, solar is making the power company's life easier, because demand for power is higher during the day than at night. For some part past that, solar is neutral—it doesn't particularly benefit the company, but it's not a negative either—they are able to sell the power, assuming they are paying a fair price for it. And then at some point on the right, there is no longer sufficient revenue to pay for the grid and the non-solar generating capacity needed to run all those net-zero houses when the sun isn't out either because it's cloudy or nighttime. Now the money to pay for the grid has to come from people who are net zero.

And somewhere before that happens, to the right side of the graph, the money that pays for the non-solar generating capacity and the grid will all be coming from people who don't have solar, even though the people who have solar also benefit both from the grid and the non-solar generation.

So when you talk about "usefulness to the grid," it's important to keep this graph in mind. At some points on the graph, that term is meaningful. At other points on the graph, it isn't. And it is absolutely unfair for users who do not have solar to subsidize users who do—in general, users without solar will be poor, and users with will be affluent, so you have a reverse subsidy.

Andrea and I have solar on our roof, and we're happy to have it, and we get a subsidy, which apparently works out well for Green Mountain Power at the moment. I'm happy that's the case, because at the moment our excess generating capacity actually benefits other users of the grid. But when the point comes where the grid exists largely to spread out the power and provide night capacity, that will no longer be the case, and it would be shameful if I were to ask for the subsidy to continue at that point, paid for largely by people less fortunate than I am, or by running the power company that maintains the grid I depend on into the ground.

IF you are relying on the grid for power when the sun isn't shinning you are NOT net zero

Good grief man, at least look up the definition of "net metering" before posting on the subject. the "net" part refers to the net balance over the billing period, what it's doing at any particular moment is irrelevant, they are measuring your overall consumption/production. The sign of the net figure tells you if you get a bill or a cheque.

According to others in Arizona you get wholesale price for the electricity you sell to the grid, but the price should not be included in the calculation of the net balance, that should be +/-kwh used per billing period. If you use Xkwh and generate Xkwh then the bill should be zero + the service cost for the grid, all retail users of the grid should pay the same universal service fee since grids do not grow by themselves.

As for all the hand wringing about clouds. ALL forms of power generation are "unreliable", to get the advertised power from 6 coal plants you will need to build 7 of them since one will always be down for 2 months per year for regular maintenance. Also as much a solar power fluctuates, coal doesn't. So you will also need gas turbines or a hydro dam for 2-6 hours a day to service the peak periods without brownouts. Also you will be producing too much electricity during the off-peak period, you can't simply "turn down" a coal plant anymore than you can "turn up" the wind and sunshine.. Coal plants MUST deal with the daily demand curve in exactly the same way solar and wind MUST deal with it, pump water uphill into a hydro dam, build a bunch of gas turbines, or over build the wind/solar farms and spread them over geographically diverse locations..

We have built the planets energy infrastructure (including the grid) around coal fired generation, coal has just as many problems as other forms of generation wrt matching the demand curve of a modern city. If you take into account the detrimental health and environment qualities of coal it is much more expensive than renewables.

In the USA most don't get a second meter, they use what's called 'net metering'. IE if you generate, say, 500 kwh in a month and use 600, you only pay for 100 kwh, even if you only used 100 kwh during the time your panels were generating significant power and used the other 500 at night and such. If your install is big enough that you go negative(spin the meter backwards), you get paid.

While 'spinning reserve' can be a problem, the bigger expense right now is that homes with solar panels are effectively getting out of would be line maintenance expenses. It costs money to keep the distribution lines and equipment up, and they're still using said lines.

You can see that most clearly with someone who ends up at a net 0 kWh usage. Even though they send power both directions over the lines, since line maintenance is paid for by a portion of the per-kWh fee, and they use net-zero, they don't pay any line maintenance.

One possibility would be to break out line maintenance into a separate fee, and charge it on gross bidirectional, rather than net volume. But then you'd need the meters to work differently. Just charging a flat monthly fee for feed-in customers is a way of approximating it for typical-sized users.

The problem is that, as currently priced, there aren't any "upkeep fees for the utility, and some small profit bonus for the utility" subtracted. The feed-in credit is at retail pricing, even though it would make more sense to credit it at wholesale, like any other generation source.

Maybe US power companies are more generous than Canadian ones, but I can tell you the big reason I haven't gone solar is because I wouldn't get out of those fees. I pay 8c/kwh (sounds reasonably cheap) yet 400kwh/month seems to work out to over $100 (interesting math...) basically the bill is full of connection fees, distribution fees, administrative fees, generation fees, etc. which are all separate from the cost of electricity of 8c/kwh.End result is that although I could net meter and reduce my liability on that 8c/kwh, even getting it down to zero wouldn't drop my bill by enough to be worth it. The only way it would actually make sense to go solar around here would be to also go off grid, which adds a lot of expense and kills any incentive.

As for this $4 fee... last I heard, our electric company had a program where you could buy solar sells from them and net-meter, their admin fee (on top of everything else) was over $30/month... so I don't see why people complain about $4!

The net metering and residential tariffs are the cause of the problem; residential customers typically are only charged per kWh as a blended rate. Take the example in parent, but let's say all usage is during the night. The transmission and distribution resources for the utility are actually 500+600kWh, although the generation cost is just 600-500kWh. (Yes, it makes me cringe too to use kWh rather than kW.). Since solar output is effectively 6 hours per day, you need to generate 3-4 times the kW rate as

You could say the same of somebody who uses less electricity for any reason - they live in a modestly-sized house, or have a gas water heater and clothes dryer, or just aren't home much - they're cheating the electric company by having a low bill! After all the fixed costs of connecting each house is the same.

And by the same rationale, are they going to give a discount to heavy users, like people who own electric cars, or swimming pools, or grow marijuana, since the fixed costs are low relative to their high usage fees?

We have net metering, but they still use two meters; otherwise there's no way to tell whether you were generating a shitload of power and using a shitload of power, or generating nothing and using nothing. I think this varies depending on local policy—if there is no subsidy, there's no need for two meters, but it's still interesting to collect the data, both for you and for the power company.

They have to manage the power. The grid has a finite capacity and they have to adjust the amount of power that they buy and/or generate to balance out the new influx of power coming from the residential customers.

I used to consult (IT) for a company that ran a couple of power plants. There are many factors to consider. It is not as simple as "Plug in, turn on, start getting paid."

Simple example. House in Arizona with solar panels. Family leaves for the day, power goes back to the grid. Family is home

The costs of maintaining your electric lines and other equipment; maintaining your transformers, wiring to your house, substations, etc; are bundled with the per-kWH costs.

By the way, they don't do a very good job -- if the electric company were paid a little more money that they were only
allowed to use for infrastructure; they might actually build better power systems that are less likely to go down,
or that have some hardening against Solar EMP risks.

If they have 6000 solar panel connections at $5 per month: 10 1/3 years to repay $3.7 M. (Or with 60,000 solar connections, just over 1 year.) Since the utilities have to look decades into the future in order to make sure they can be profitable then too, its a small price to pay.

Why are you even paying companies to build your infrastructure? You pay them, they cream their profit off the top and then build it and use it to make even more profit out of you. Why not just build the infrastructure yourself and run it non-profit for your own benefit, or even charge the utility companies to use it?

The Arizona Corporation Commission, which regulates utilities in the state, agreed in a 3-to-2 vote at a meeting yesterday in Phoenix that Arizona Public Service Co. may collect about $4.90 a month from customers with solar systems.....Arizona Public had requested a fee of $50 a month or more, and the commission’s decision “falls well short of protecting the interests of the 1 million residential customers who do not have solar panels,” Chief Executive Officer Don Brandt said in a statement.......“We preserved customer choice in Arizona while recognizing that these cost shifts are real,” said Bob Stump, chairman of the commission. “I think it’s a fair outcome.” The regulators overruled their staff, who recommended in September that the issue be taken up in the utility’s next formal rate case in 2015.The utility spent $3.7 million to promote its argument, compared with about $330,000 spent by the solar industry, according to documents filed with the commission.

Oldest trick in the book. Ask for the moon ($50/month insanity) and cry when they hand you a sterling silver platter instead.

I sincerely hope cheap high density batteries come out in the next decade that will make grid tie completely moot point if all you want is energy at night.

When cheap high density batteries hit the market, it's the utilities which will at first use them in large arrays, allowing them to leverage energy surplusses and redistribute them, and thus making their own cost of maintaining power much lower. Private energy systems won't be able to compete on price, making autarkic electric power systems an expensive toy for people with too much money at hand or too much paranoia in the brain.

That isn't possible here, because to share power among the members of the coop, you need electric transmission lines, and towers to hold them up, which means you need land, right-of-way, etc. You can only get that with the government's blessing, and they've already given that blessing to the local power utility monopoly. They're not going to give it to someone else, because the whole point of a utility monopoly is that you only need one set of infrastructure because it's infeasible to have dozens of sets of transmission lines running all over, so you give one company a monopoly for this, and have them regulated by the government so they don't go nuts with their monopoly. The government can't give other companies the same rights because then they'd be admitting they're doing a poor job in their capacity as regulators.

I completely agree with your post, however I think the utility monopoly shouldn't just be regulated by the government, but owned by it. Then it's a non-profit where profits are ploughed back into infrastructure improvement, or lower taxes for the population of the state.

Actually the reason we have a rural utility coop here is because there wasn't enough people to entice the power company to run power lines. The cooperative installed the power lines and purchases the power from the electric company at wholesale and then bills each coop customer based on usage (basically a community owned power company). Technically there is nothing preventing them from using those same lines to do what the GP proposed.

You still need fossil fuel power plants to regulate voltage. Those have to be paid for and solar installations are getting a benefit without paying for it. VARS aren't cheap. And bitching over 5 bucks a month - that is nothing.

Aluminium smelters need predictable cheap electricity. They don't do well with variable renewable sources like solar and wind since when the power drops the bauxite melt in the electrolytic cell solidifies and stops being a conductor and the crud needs to be jackhammered out before the cell can be re-used.

Hydro is the best source of electricity for this purpose; Norway is another country exporting their cheap hydroelectricity in the form of refined aluminium billets.

However, I am not OK with some other policies that I have seen, such as no buyback for excess generation. Or, as in my case, the policy is such that regardless of how much excess generation you pump into the grid, there will NEVER be a net on the bill. The bill will always be at least ~$30 even if I pump 20MW of excess generation back into the grid.

It really pisses me off. But, luckily, the state commission just approved another rate hike that "will benefit consumers".

If you have solar panels and don't want to sell your excess back to the utility then don't . But don't try to pretend that you don't make use of the grid when you do. The public utility has been forced to buy your excess energy at above market rates thus pushing up costs to everyone. Stop crying about being treated like a wholesale power supplier.

According to the information I find about Arizona net metering [dsireusa.org], the power you generate offsets your bill (at retail rates) until your bill is zero; after that you are paid wholesale for any excess:

"Net metering is accomplished using a single bi-directional meter. Any customer net excess generation (NEG) will be carried over to the customer's next bill at the utility's retail rate, as a kilowatt-hour (kWh) credit. Any NEG remaining at the customer’s last monthly bill in a calendar year will be paid to the customer, via check or billing credit, at the utility’s avoided cost payment. "

If this is really true, then the utility is making a profit reselling the power you generate. So what's the basis for this fee they want to charge?

the fee which is paid for by your neighbors whom are paying for the power the utility bought at wholesale from you the solar producer, and the ultility marks up 500%? Plus the additional $8 a month "customer fee" for the pleasure of being hooked to the grid? Oh and plus the massive subsidies given to the utilities by the government? Those poor utilities certainly can not afford to upgrade their infrastructure without feeding at the government trough.

Not only that, but because solar generates the most energy in the middle of the day which is also when there is the highest rate of consumption, it helps to reduce peak demand. Peak demand is the most expensive kind of electricity to generate because most electric plants aren't variable, they are either on or off and spinning them up costs a lot of money.

Residential solar also reduces the need to build an entirely new plant to handle peak demand. It really is a big-time win for most utilities. Them going

Except that building in the necessary safety management, and power management, to deal with current coming the other way from your customers is not free. Clients with solar panels are unlikely to call the electrical plant and announce when they are disconnecting for maintenance. And clouds passing over an area can cause serious variation in the customer provided solar power, in highly variable fashion that affects whole neighborhoods of panels.

I'm not sure I understand the logic of the commission (that is, the logic of their stated argument, as opposed to the unspoken "we just got $3.7 million from the utilities so we'd better side with them" argument that we all suspect).

The Arizona Corporation Commission says that this fee is necessary because people who use solar are foisting off some of the maintenance cost onto the other customers who do not use solar panels.

Some residents installed solar-electric panels on their homes. Any excess energy they generate is sold back to the utilities, transmitted through the utilities infrastructure. The utilities are claiming that this is costing its other, non-solar customers money. But how?

It's not costing them money in infrastructure; that is still being paid for by all its customers - including those using solar power, as they are still hooked up to the grid and paying Arizona Public for the service (necessary, I suppose, for the occasional cloudy day in AZ). The maintenance costs of the lines are included in this service, just as they are for any other Arizona Public customer; it is not as if AP had to hook up any extra lines to these users of solar power, or as if the lines remain connected and the solar-customers aren't paying for the privilege.

The utility has to pay for the juice they receive back from these solar-customers, but they can then redistribute this power to other non-solar customers. AP need generate less electricity. I/suppose/ that AP might be operating at loss here if they have to pay out more per watt than it costs them to generate it themselves, but I have strong doubts this is the case. More likely, they are getting a deal on the extra volts and saving by not having to buy extra fuel for their generators.

In either case, I do not see how the use of solar would raise the cost of electricity for non-solar customers. Maintenance is shared equally among all customers, and purchased electricity from solar users saves the corporation money. There's no added cost to be passed on to non-solar customers.

There is a danger of becoming irrelevant (and unprofitable!) if solar usage takes off, but - while that may be the real concern of the utility - that is/not/ the argument that they are making.

Is the Arizona Corporation Commission's case that blatantly bogus or am just I missing something?

With net-metering, the pay back to solar panel owners feeding the mains is basically the retail rate for power. By definition, this rate is higher than the utility's cost to produce power. Further, solar is fairly variable, so there the utilities don't get to shut down any plants as a result of the solar electric.

The remaining question is whether they can scale back production to match the solar input, and can do so rapidly enough that the solar panels really are offsetting power production in some fashio

With net-metering, the pay back to solar panel owners feeding the mains is basically the retail rate for power

Thank you. I was unaware - and quite surprised - by this. The retail rate, of course, includes bundled into it part of the maintenance costs so technically Arizona Public's - and the Arizona Corporation Commission's - argument does have merit.

I am surprised because I would have bet good money that the utilities would have arranged things so they bought back electricity at a lower rate than it cost them to generate the same amount of power - isn't that sort of conniving how corporations usually manage things here? - but in this case it works to the benefit of the customer.

Looking solely at the argument present by AP and the ACC, I now understand their logic. Of course, I don't/agree/ with their argument, since it focuses primarily on the short-term benefit of the power utility and does nothing to encourage moving us towards renewable energy sources, but as that was a factor that was cleverly ignored by the lawyers, I suppose their argument - limited in scope as it is - is sound.

Ultimately, I believe this will be taken to court. Hopefully there the larger implications of this decision will be tested and the ACC's judgement found wanting.

I do not see how the use of solar would raise the cost of electricity for non-solar customers

There is a cost associated with keeping a local gas or coal plant running at, say, 30% power ready to make up for shifts in solar and wind input. Plants run most efficiently at 100%, and there is significant efficiency loss running at lower output. Also, the fixed costs of the running the plant (staff, etc) remain the same, even though less power is being produced, thereby further increasing the power production costs from that plant. Don't underestimate this cost. The need for this spinning reserve is incr

Demand is not flat and the peak is in the day when all this solar stuff is making life a hell of a lot easier for power distribution. I think I worked that out in the first week I was involved with electricity generation back in the 1990s when there was almost nothing but coal and small hydro on my state's grid, so are you slow or are you not actually in the electricity generation industry?

Well, then, explain what happens during the day as cloud cover moves over a large area. Solar input drops and it must be made up with traditional sources. Fossil and gas need to spin up. But Fossil plants take hours to start from cold, and gas plants lose money if they are not running at full. Spinning reserve is required even for that slow moving peak. Those resources must be ready and available. You can argue to which extent they are needed, but do dismiss that need shows me you don't get the bigger pictu

> It's not costing them money in infrastructure; that is still being paid for by all its customers - including those using solar power

So lets say I put up exactly the number of panels that net meters me to zero on a yearly basis.

Due to night, seasonality, weather, etc, that means that what's actually going on is that I'm exporting major quantities of power during the day, and then buying from the grid those other times. So it's not like I'm not using the infrastructure just as much as the guy next to me that doesn't have panels. In fact, I'm using it more.

Yet because my bill is zero, I'm paying less than him as a function of maintaining the grid. It shouldn't be that way, but it is.

The contrary argument is equally interesting. Let's say I don't put up that many panels, but just one of them. That produces about the same amount of power that my fridge uses daily. So in fact, there is exactly zero difference between putting up a panel, and buying a new energy star fridge. Both of those will have the exact same effect on my total use of the grid. Yet in one I will now be charged $4.90 a month, and the other I won't.

The actual problem here is that some of the grid cost is buried in the electricity rate. If they truly separated the two, then this problem wouldn't have existed in the first place. However, that is likely on the order of hundreds of dollars a month. For the average user the cost would be identical in the end, one line on the bill would go up and another down. However, for people who sip power, or turn it off completely (at the cottage in the winter), their bills will go way up.

Let's say you and I can both buy a shelf at Wal-Mart for $10. Now I start making shelves for myself instead, and make an exact duplicate of Wal-Mart's $10 shelf. Should my nearest Wal-Mart be required to buy my shelf for $10, transport it to your nearest Wal-Mart, and then sell it to you for $10? They have trucks already, so why should they charge me for the transportation costs?

I/suppose/ that AP might be operating at loss here if they have to pay out more per watt than it costs them to generate it themselves

That's exactly the case. If they charge residential customers $0.10/kWh, you don't think all $0.10 goes to pay for the power p

The cost of delivering power has two components: fixed costs (say, power lines to the home) and variable costs (say, of producing the power) The current system was to bundle the fixed costs into the variable ones, and just chage proportional to consumption. Since those selling back power to the grid still need to pay for the fixed costs, this principle of this change seems right. Better execution would have been to add the fixed cost to everyone and make a corresponding reduction to the marginal (per KWh) tariff, at which point those with and without solar panels would be treated equally.

This law is the equivalent of telling your wife you love her while beating her half to death.
Society should love people who conserve energy and our government has begged the public to conserve for decades. So laws that encourage people to use solar power are all that we should have. This new tax will hold back solar installations which is exactly what the government claims it does not want. The same is true for electric cars. Electric cars avoid a gas tax so some states now have a special fee for allowing people to use electric cars under the guise that they are not paying their fair share of road taxes.
In the case of a fee applied to solar powered homes the tiny fee first required means little. But it puts people on notice that that fee will grow and grow over time.
The simple truth is that as more and more homes go solar the grid, in effect, gets smaller and smaller but still has the same maintenance fees which must be passed on to the people who use the grid. Therefore we should expect electric prices to rise for those that do not install solar which will encourage more and more people to go solar. At some point the power gri will not be needed at all for homes and industry will be the only consumer.

Let's see, you're probably planning to spend $15,000-$20,000 after factoring in the incentives, in the hope that you'll reduce your power bills by enough to pay for that in some reasonable time. But, then, OH NO you discover that you'll have to pay $4.90/month, so of course you immediately abandon your plans, because now it's utterly hopeless that the project might ever have a decent return. Yeah, right...

It seems to me that all customers should be charged this fee and their per kwh fee reduced. This is a service that benefits all customers, not just solar panel owners. In some ways, non-solar customers use the gird even more that the home generators. It is a matter of getting the power charge, the distribution charge and the connection charge properly balanced across the board.

I have to pay 15 dollars a month, about half my bill right now, just to stay connected to the grid. So adding another massive dis-incentive for conservation really does seem unfair. You can never conserve your bill to zero.As more homes get built with solar pre-installed, I look forward to the time when entire subdivisions buy a "community battery" and never need fossil.

Disconnect from the grid entirely. But yeah - raise the fee - or try to do it. You'll find that your electric provider has the upper hand in setting those rates. They're a protected monopoly after all.

I have to wonder though with the advances in storage technology - I mean a stupid rule like this would just force me to go off grid completely.

...is to turn the question around. There are two electrical generation utilities connected by a wire: your solar panels and their big fossil plant. Their problem is that they are *required* to buy power from yours when yours happens to be generating, whether they need any power or not. They *have* to turn down or shut off their big plant whenever your system feels like doing some output.

How would most of us feel about being *required* to buy electrical power whenever their plant is underutilized and nee

Here in Vermont if you 'sell' via grid-tie you're not paid, rather you get a 'credit' that you must spend before the end of the year. Then at the end of the year the power utility company 'donates' your accumulated credits to itself. Since most power is generated in the sunny months of warm weather and most power is needed during the cold winter months this means the power company comes out way ahead. All summer and fall you are accumulating power credits and then they steal them, oops, I mean donate the credits to themselves so that all winter when your system is producing little power you must buy power and can't use your accumulated summer credits.

On top of that they charge a hookup fee and a monthly fee for services, a meter reading fee (although they don't actually read meters anymore) and a energy efficiency fee and then taxes on the power you generated too.

The free market argument is a weak one, and doesn't correlate with the reality in which we live. Have you seen the way "free market" ISPs operate in regards to competition? Doesn't work so well does it? With many geographical areas being locked into a choice between AT&T and Time Warner, there is virtually no competition. There are many who are arguing that ISPs should be treated as public utilities so that they can't throttle competing services that traverse their wires, requiring government interventi

We have a shitty choice because ISPs lobbied to get municipalities to give them exclusive monopolies and ISPs choose amongst themselves to not compete with each other in certain areas. The best part is then the ISPs come back around and act like the very things they lobbied for were against what they wanted.

So free market caused "geographical areas being locked into a choice between AT&T and Time Warner"!? I don't think you quite understand what free market means. It is regulation at the local level that gives monopoly to ISP providers over certain geographical areas, not the free market.

As for government getting it's hands off military industrial complex, you got it wrong again. The primary purpose of the government is the national security, that's one thing that can't be privatized. This is not to say th

That is just one tiny example of why gov't shouldn't be regulating any businesses, why it shouldn't be involved in any projects, including infrastructure - no competition. If this law passes, it just gives the gov't established monopoly a special power to tax people because they have no competition. No competing grids, no competing roads, no competing water and sewer and garbage providers, etc.etc. This company COULD, in a free market, do the same thing: impose a fee like that. However if it did, people would have a choice to switch to another provider, however that would have been done, but we can't even KNOW at this point, because of gov't meddling, which gives monopolies to the most connected players.

While I generally agree that the marketplace should decide who wins and loses, there are some things that are impractical to leave to the market. Taking your example of roads: how would you picture a road system for a city that allows for multiple "road providers?" How would new players enter the market? I ask because I can't picture having multiple road grids in the same geographical area that doesn't end up with more roads than buildings (picture downtown Chicago with the local lanes and express lanes

Oddly enough in most of Europe, with their big government that actually regulates industry, you see MORE competition in broadband, in cell service. Weird. Almost like businesses get too huge, start monopolistic practices, and NEED to be wacked with a stick once in a while.

Remember folks, there's a world outside the USA, and it works pretty well for a lot of things. Our culture/economy/law is not a universal Truth for the world.

I was thinking more along the lines of people stocking up and staging a nice protest next spring/summer. Be pretty fun if half their customers dropped service for a couple months and just used their solar. Wonder how nice their profits would look for those other million customers.

That probably won't work: most (all?) grid-tie solar systems will cut off the solar panels if the grid connection is interrupted (so as to avoid feeding power back into the lines in an outage, which would endanger utility workers). Battery-backed solar systems could run independently, but are considerably more expensive and require more maintenance than simple grid-tie systems.

Also, most (again, all?) states have legal requirements that inhabited dwellings have basic utility service (e.g. electricity, water

How is this "from people that don't receive any service from them"? If you don't have a solar panel, you don't pay it. If you have panels, but don't sell back to the utility, you don't pay it. If you have a panel, you sell back to them and they have to provide the infrastructure to do so, then you pay the extra.